jessemock said:
Take a look at the Unknown Armies system.
[much snippage]
In short, I vote for the other UA!
Seconded, indeed I didn't realise that the UA being discussed in this thread wasn't Unknown Armies on my first pass through. There are some groovy subtleties to UArm's sanity mechanic that I won't go into here but make it worth checking out (plus the game is great with oodles of atmospheric fiction and background that's very thought provoking).
A minor nitpick - someone accruing 10 'hardened' checks in a meter is on the way to being a sociopath rather than a psychopath. Which is an important distinction for those who care.
Further the big short-term benefit of being 'hardened' is that you don't have to make checks on any stressors that are rated at below the number of hardened notches you have - which addresses Bauglir's 'slippery slope' concern and generally means that borderline sociopaths are utterly unfazed by situations that have many 'normally adjusted' individuals wigged out and gibbering in the corner (BTW normally adjusted means those with ~8-12 hardened notches distributed across the five meters - people with no hardened notches at all tend to be unplayably sensitive to the woes of the world and either acquire some psychic scar tissue or end up in the booby-hatch).
UA's sanity meters produce results that are closer to how real people behave when confronted by psychological stressors than CoC's fairly primitive SAN mechanic; this is good for 'realism' purposes but might not be what you want when playing D&D. Fr'instance if you take the vanilla UA set-up and scales (with the obvious proviso that your definition of 'unnatural' is going to differ for a fantasy world when compared to ours) then typical PCs are likely to have a whole bunch of hardened notches on their 'violence' and 'unnatural' meters (the unnatural is *way* more common in D&D-land even after you adjust for 'mundane weird' stuff like kobolds, hobbits and ogres) pretty much from the get-go and a fair few will be maxed out after a few game-months of killing things and taking their stuff.
The other problem is deciding on what handicap accrues to characters who pick up the complete set of maximum hardened across all five meters and become honest-to-goodness sociopaths. In UArm such characters cannot ascend to the Celestial Chorus (which is a major event in the UArm universe - akin to becoming a demigod or an angelic being but somewhat rare as you might imagine) and ummm... I think there are other more immediate downsides for people who aren't planning on becoming a God this week but I don't recall what they are. Something to do with lacking passion and affect, but vanilla D&D mechanics don't reflect those things very well (or at all).
Given that 'hardening' represents the character cutting themselves off from the world in order to protect their threatened sense of self I'd incline towards something that hits a character in their mental stats. Maybe each meter you are fully hardened against acts as a transient negative on your highest mental stat - so having a completely impenetrable shell impacts on your mental/social effectiveness and buggers up higher level spellcasting for magic using characters. This would certainly act as a powerful spur for Cleric/Paladin/Bard types to shy away from becoming stone-killers, but doesn't model the classic wizard-meddling-with-things-man-wasn't-meant-to-know so well and penalises the physically-oriented classes much less severely. Hmmmm.... dunno - more thought needed.
Whatever it is the penalty should be pretty significant in the longer term (closing off strategic options or similar) but relatively painless, or even quite useful, in the short term. Sociopathy is all about cauterised emotional intelligence, so it should press buttons that feed into instant gratification, lousy long term planning and less than stellar interpersonal skills IMO.
Regards
Luke
